Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.